Synergy of stimulus-driven salience and goal-directed prioritization: evidence from the spatial blink

In the spatial blink paradigm, participants search for a target of a designated color in a rapidly presented stream of letters at fixation. Target identification is typically impaired if a peripheral distractor appears shortly before the target, inducing a spatial blink, but impairment is observed only when the distractor also shares the sought-for color. Such results reveal an important top-down influence on the capture of attention. In the present experiments, we examined the influence of the bottom-up transients associated with the appearance and disappearance of distractors in the spatial blink paradigm. Onsets and offsets alone are incapable of inducing a spatial blink, but we found that the presence of such transients did enhance the effects of target-color-matched distractors. The results reveal important synergistic interactions between top-down and bottom-up factors involved in attentional capture.